Varujan Vosganian, president of the Upper House Budget, finance and banks Commission, told a press conference this week that in the last days, foreign investors have been obliviously keeping aloof of bourse transactions, an attitude that could be easily correlated with the indictment of two members of the National Commission for Transferable Securities (CNVM). CNVM vice-president Paul Gabriel Miclaus and his colleague, commissioner Victor Eros, are subject to criminal investigations in the same file in which oil tycoon Dinu Patriciu, George Philip Stephenson and Florin Iuliu Aldea are accused of economic crimes.

“The Stock Exchange is a sensitive market. Such investigations need to be conducted with discretion and should be made public only when there is enough evidence to prevent any negative psychological reaction,” said Varujan Vosganian after four of the seven CNVM members were heard by the Budget-Finance Commission. Vosganian said that the hearings have re-constituted the events one year and a half ago, specifically of mid-April 2004, when Rompetrol was listed on the bourse and was subject to unusually massive trades, with the buyback price higher than the selling price. The Commission tried to establish if this had been a manipulation and if some of the market’s decision-makers had tolerated the actions of the manipulators.

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